Please considering supporting the channel through my patreon link to help continue the consistent uploads. Thanks.
World War II Cartoon.
Hideki Tojo (Kyūjitai: 東條 英機; Shinjitai: 東条 英機; About this soundTōjō Hideki (help·info); 30 December 1884 – 23 December 1948) was a Japanese politician and general of the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) who concurrently served as Leader of the Imperial Rule Assistance Association and Prime Minister of Japan during much of World War II. He was among the most outspoken proponents for preventive war against the United States before the attack on Pearl Harbor[2] and one of the leading perpetrators behind Japanese war crimes on prisoners of war and civilians during the Pacific conflict. After the end of the war, Tojo was arrested, condemned and sentenced to death by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, and hanged on December 23, 1948.[1]
Hideki Tojo was born in the Kōjimachi district of Tokyo on December 30, 1884,[3] as the third son of Hidenori Tojo, a lieutenant general in the Imperial Japanese Army.[4] Under the bakufu, Japanese society was divided rigidly into four castes; the merchants, artisans, peasants and the samurai. After the Meiji Restoration, the caste system was abolished in 1871, but the former caste distinctions in many ways persisted afterwards, ensuring that those from the former samurai caste continued to enjoy their traditional prestige.[5] The Tojo family came from the samurai caste, though the Tojos were relatively lowly warrior retainers for the great daimyōs (lords) that they had served for generations.[6] Tojo's father was a samurai turned Army officer and his mother was the daughter of a Buddhist priest, making his family very respectable, but poor.[5]
Hideki had an education typical of a Japanese youth in the Meiji era.[7] The purpose of the Meiji educational system was to train the boys to be soldiers as adults, and the message was relentlessly drilled into Japanese students that war was the most beautiful thing in the entire world, that the Emperor was a living god and that the greatest honor for a Japanese man was to die for the Emperor.[8] Japanese girls were taught that the highest honor for a woman was to have as many sons as possible who could die for the Emperor in war. As a boy, Tojo was known for his stubbornness, lack of a sense of humor, for being an opinionated and combative youth fond of getting into fights with the other boys and for his tenacious way of pursuing what he wanted.[9] Japanese schools in the Meiji era were very competitive, and there was no tradition of sympathy for failure; those who did so were often bullied by the teachers.[9] Tojo was of average intelligence, but was known to compensate for his limited intelligence with a willingness to work extremely hard.[9] Tojo's boyhood hero was the 17th-century shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu who issued the injunction: "Avoid the things you like, turn your attention to unpleasant duties".[9] Tojo liked to say: "I am just an ordinary man possessing no shining talents. Anything I have achieved I owe to my capacity for hard work and never giving up".[9]
0 Comments